The Puritans brought their laws on abortion from merry old England, where the procedure was also legal until quickening.
Since the Puritans believed that one could be godly without children and that life began when a mother felt her baby kick, their strict religious code had no need to outlaw abortion before quickening. The legal documents of the time are rampant with recorded “sexual offenses,” and the percentage of firstborn children born early or completely out of wedlock hovered at around 40 percent during the colonial era. Although premarital and extramarital sexual relationships were illegal, they were so common that enforcement was never very strict. Puritans believed that marital sex for pleasure was important and that marriage was a contract of love, not just economics. In reality, the Puritans were much more lighthearted than is commonly thought, and in some ways, they were quite progressive when it came to sexual conduct. It is hard for modern Americans to believe that a society as pious and austere as the Puritans’ New England-the cultural and legal parent of much of early American communal life-tolerated a controversial procedure such as abortion. This popular perception is drawn partly from books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which portrays Puritan society as deeply religious, dark, and unforgiving. This is partly thanks to the American imagination, which paints the Puritans-the first English settlers on American soil to focus on creating communities and families-as strict, foreboding people, incapable of joy or laughter, let alone sexual pleasure. To many people, the facts about abortion’s legality in early America can be surprising. Americans United for Life also describes itself on its website as working to “restore a culture of life.” Of course, when the founding fathers met in a sweltering hall in Pennsylvania to declare independence, such a culture was not even a twinkle in their eyes. Americans United for Life makes the same mistake on its website, misconstruing a quote from Thomas Jefferson-“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government”-as being anti-abortion. Other anti-abortion groups such as the Family Research Council claim that abortion could not have had “foundation in the text of the Constitution”-overlooking the fact that when the Constitution was written, abortion was legal until quickening. Abortion Laws,” it claims that abortion in the American colonies “was ruled a misdemeanor if performed prior to quickening.” On a page titled “ Fast Facts: History of U.S. Fox News also falsifies American abortion history on its website. On the National Right to Life’s website, for example, a page titled “ Abortion History Timeline” describes “a few rogue doctors and midwives” performing abortions in early America, only “as far back as the 1850s.” In reality, trusted midwives and medical practitioners performed abortions from the beginning of American colonial life and throughout world history.
Anti-abortion organizations such as the National Right to Life spin a narrative in which legal abortion is a historical anomaly and an unnatural consequence of modern America’s loose moral standards. That, however, is not the way the anti-abortion movement likes to paint the history of abortion in the United States. If a woman living in New England in the 17th or 18th centuries wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force would have stopped her. Official abortion laws did not appear on the books in the United States until 1821, and abortion before quickening did not become illegal until the 1860s. But the six-week deadline contrasts starkly with early American abortion law, where the procedure was legal until “ quickening”-the first time a mother feels the baby kick, which can happen anywhere from 14 weeks to 26 weeks into pregnancy.Ībortion was not just legal-it was a safe, condoned, and practiced procedure in colonial America and common enough to appear in the legal and medical records of the period. Federal judges have blocked the new restrictions until legal challenges to their constitutionality are settled. Legislators in Little Rock and Bismarck have passed new restrictions that ban abortions according to when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. If recent legislation passed in Arkansas and North Dakota is allowed to stand, it will be harder for women to get an abortion in those states than it was in New England in 1650.